Starting with December 21st, beta packages of Catel will be published to NuGet. Starting with NuGet 1.6, it is possible to create “pre-release” packages. This way, it is possible to give users that like to live on the edge a change to update their packages via NuGet.

Strange versioning

The versioning of the beta versions is a bit strange. This is due to a bug in NuGet which does not support the full SemVer standard to include build numbers. Therefore, the beta versions are always 1 less than the next official version.

For example, say that version 2.4 is currently the official version, and the team is working towards version 2.5. Then all beta versions for 2.5 will have this version number:

2.4.[yyyyMMdd]-beta (thus on December 21st, the version would be 2.4.20111221-beta).

Installing the beta via NuGet

Unfortunately, the NuGet package manager does support pre-releases. So, the beta versions must be installed via the shell. This example installs Catel.Windows as a package. However, to install other packages simple change the ID (name) of the package.

Installing the latest beta

   1: Install-Package Catel.Windows –IncludePrerelease

Installing a specific beta

   1: Install-Package Catel.Windows –IncludePrerelease -version 2.4.20111221-beta

Updating to the latest beta

   1: Update-Package Catel.Windows –IncludePrerelease

Updating to a specific beta

   1: Update-Package Catel.Windows –IncludePrerelease -version 2.4.20111221-beta

Updating to the latest stable version

   1: Update-Package Catel.Windows